Thanks for all of the posts. I think I'm going to forget about those SUVs due to your comments. The borderline numbers are enough for me to think that towing with one of those vehicles would be too risky. Maybe not for a weekend trip, but certainly for the year-long trip I am planning.
Happily, my better half appears to like those big vans, and it looks like the Ford E-350, Express 3500, and NV 3500 V8 all come in configurations with plenty of payload. Going into this, I naively thought that any car manufacturer that makes a truck that can pull 20,000 lbs. would make some sort of SUV built on the same frame where they just replaced the truck bed with a couple of rows of seats. I was wrong. Maybe when SUVs first came out, but not now. The SUVs I have found today are just reconfigured station wagons from the 80s. Station wagons that appeal to today's middle class without looking like something from National Lampoon. These larger vans appear to be the truck-based vehicle with a bunch of seats that I'm looking for, but they are so bare-bones and have horrible gas mileage. Where is the big passenger van with a Ford Ecoboost that can tow a ton? It doesn't exist. I guess it's because the market for these vans and SUVs is so small compared to the truck market.
